Colour-Dielectric Gauge Theory on a Transverse Lattice

Abstract

We investigate consequences of the effective colour-dielectric formulation of lattice gauge theory using the light-cone Hamiltonian formalism with a transverse lattice (hep-ph/9704408). As a quantitative test of this approach, we have performed extensive analytic and numerical calculations for 2+1-dimensional pure gauge theory in the large $N$ limit. We study the structure of coupling constant space for our effective potential by comparing with results available from conventional Euclidean lattice Monte Carlo simulations of this system. In particular, we calculate and measure the scaling behaviour of the entire low-lying glueball spectrum, glueball wavefunctions, string tension, asymptotic density of states, and deconfining temperature.